[ih] MAP & BBN

[Alex McKenzie]

Bill,

I know MAP was perpetually annoyed by BBN and always felt BBN claimed to have invented everything.  I was at BBN the entire time and I always felt most of Mike's criticism was unjustified.  BBN wrote a lot of papers, with ARPAs strong encouragement, about what we did do, and BBN did a lot.  We didn't write about what others did- that was up to them.  So if others didn't write so much, the written history got kind of BBN-centric.

One notable exception:  Ray Tomlinson was credited by a lot of non-BBN people with "inventing email" and Mike was justifiably upset every time he heard that claim.  Mike seems to have blamed BBN for making that claim.  However, I think you can look as carefully as you want at BBN publications and you will not find that claim made by BBN.

Sincerely,
Alex




________________________________
 From: Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com>
To: David Elliott Bell <bell1945 at offthisweek.com> 
Cc: "internet-history at postel.org" <internet-history at postel.org> 
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 10:59 PM
Subject: Re: [ih] Hesitating to disagree with one of the fathers of the Internet…..
 

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 5:34 PM, David Elliott Bell <bell1945 at offthisweek.com> wrote:

the need for layers (3 will do if you know what you're going; if you don't, 11 won't help you); 

Correction, it is canonically '17 won't help you' . 
The ironic allusion to the hol(e)y 7 of the Other Reference Model ("ISORM") makes this MAPhorism much funnier than mere exaggeration.

a world view about which layers and the rigidity required to enforce layers; proposing alternate protocols for achieving a desired goal; things like that are part of design-ARPANET.
Mike having come to protocol design and programming via poetry rather than prosaic electrical engineering, yes, he viewed layering as the design, as the essense. The fact that both the IMPs and NCP have been retired but the network that  (D)ARPA wrought lives on as "the Internet", over a hybrid hodgepodge of physical subnets, militates that his logical view of The Net has won out over the physical, just as the pragmatic, good-enough ARM has won out of the overly baroque OSI ISORM .

However ...

The Popular History of the Net has largely been told from the BBN POV. As an editorial/authorial decision, this is understandably so, much though it may annoy those who worked on upper layers. Having a for-profit's PR office on the case doesn't hurt, but that is not solely responsible. It's easier to follow BBN'S  IMP/TIP narrative than a narrative spread over several campuses and multiple OS's no one uses anymore, and far easier to explain challenges of hardware than challenges of software to a general audience. I have corroboration on that bald assertion -- Tracey Kidder interviewed the DG 'Eagle' operating system team manager while researching 'Soul of the New Machine', and couldn't figure out how to explain it, so went back to focusing on hardware and microcode teams. Networking may be easier to make metaphor than an OS, but not compared to modems.

[I worked for said DG manager at his next gig, and volunteered with a 'microkid' a few years later. The microkid taught me to drink cognac at ACM committee meetings; Mike's whisky lessons cured me of that quickly.] 

-- 
Bill
@n1vux bill.n1vux at gmail.com
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